Nvidia is bringing supercomputer-class performance to its $192 Jetson TK1 computer, which is targeted at embedded devices but could be used as a Linux-based gaming PC.

The TK1 is an uncased board with all the major components on it, much like the popular Raspberry Pi. But the computer offers 300 gigaflops of performance, and Nvidia said it could be used as a PC for games supporting ARM processors and the Linux OS.

Desktop

A report from a few years ago (2003) showed government was still using IT only about 10% of the time and then mostly for typing. “Linux” only appeared once in that report and it was misspelled, “Linu x”. Spreading that other OS clearly was the goal.

Power is not generally associated with Chromebooks, since they utilize either ARM processors, like tablets, or Intel’s Celeron processors. Google‘s Pixel was the only Chromebook that could be described as powerful because it uses one of Intel’s Core i5 processors. However, on Monday we saw an Acer Chromebook that is powered by an Intel Core i3 processor. This is a large jump from the usual low power processors found in most Chromebooks, and will offer that power at a much lower price than the Chromebook Pixel.

So when you consider your next PC purchase, give ChromeOS a consideration and when you look at the sales on Amazon, it appears many people are starting to do just that. I would suggest though if you are looking for a Chromebook replacement to a bulky desktop PC with features you don’t need, you go for as large a screen as possible. 14″ seems to be the best size and accommodates web pages, apps et al, comfortably.

Server

When a Senior Director at Google, Gordon MacKen, showed off new Google server motherboard design based on IBM’s Power8 architecture, it sparked trouble for Intel. Since 1998, Google has used Intel processors based on x86 architecture to power its army of servers, but this sudden move to use IBM’s architecture is a reason for worry at Intel.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Linus Torvalds, the principal force behind development of the Linux kernel and overseer of open source development for the Linux operating system, has been named the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award “for pioneering development of the Linux kernel using the open-source approach”.

Graphics Stack

The first version 1.5 release candidates of Wayland and the Weston compositor are now available.

Kristian Høgsberg announced today the first release candidates for Wayland/Weston 1.5. Kristian noted, “We’re at a historic low in terms of open bugs – as of this writing we have 15 bugs in wayland/weston bugzilla. There are a few more bugs we can fix and I expect more will come in as we start testing, but right now it’s looking pretty good.”

Our latest focus in benchmarking the Linux 3.15 kernel is the Radeon DRM kernel graphics driver. There’s been some reports of small performance changes with this newest kernel currently under development, in part due to some video memory optimizations that landed this cycle. In this article are benchmarks of four AMD Radeon graphics cards when running Linux 3.14 and 3.15 Git.

The pull request was sent in by AMD’s Christian König and tries to add support for their newly-announced Mullins APUs. This pull comes shortly after AMD announced open-source Mullins/Beema APU support, one day after the APUs were announced. Support for the new AMD graphics hardware might come in still for the Linux 3.15 kernel even though it’s past the merge window since the GPU is based upon AMD’s Kabini and mostly deals with adding new PCI IDs and enums to the kernel driver. There’s also the libdrm and Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D updates needed in user-space for complete support.

The recent issues were expressed by NVIDIA and come from a change to the cursor handling with X.Org Server 1.16, which will be released around July of this year. A late change broke the video API/ABI driver interfaces and expressed concern to the open-source graphics driver developers. The issue was of concern since it came after the code freeze for X.Org Server 1.16.

Building upon their open-source graphics driver support for the Tegra K1 and their revised code for handling this Kepler GPU in the ARM world, the third revision was sent out a short time ago by Alexandre Courbot.

The developer behind the fun indie hit Vox a voxel based, action, adventure and creation game with a big focus on player created content has re-confirmed their plans for the Linux version. The good news is that the major content patch is now out, so once dust settles on that the Linux version will come!

Desktop Environments/WMs

So SlideViewer was born. The beauty of it is that all our Qt developers can help to add features and fix bugs, and even more importantly, we no longer have to stare at incomprehensible error messages from LaTeX, or hunt down a book that will tell us how to get page numbers in the table of contents.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Packages for the release of KDE’s document suite Calligra 2.8.1 are available for Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and 13.10. You can get it from the Kubuntu Backports PPA (alongside KDE SC 4.13). They are also in our development release.

Firefox has extra features that Konqueror doesn’t have and the add-ons might be a deal breaker for some people. The page rendering worked perfectly on every site I tried and to be honest I use it everyday so if it didn’t work I wouldn’t use it.

Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.13 are available for Kubuntu 12.04LTS, 13.10 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. It includes an update of Plasma Desktop to 4.11.8.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

The code that looks up and caches the album art was rewritten by Vadim, so it was a lot faster now. Also, the album art in the Albums view will now be loaded on-scroll – they won’t load unless they are not shown in the window.

The GNOME developers announced that the latest version of GNOME Online Accounts, 3.13.1, has arrived and comes with just a couple of changes, which are quite important.

The 3.13.x branch of GNOME is strictly for development and it will eventually evolve into the stable 3.14, but that’s a long way ahead. Until then, the developer chose to make some very interesting changes

The Clonezilla developers released a new development version for their Linux distro and they’ve decided to also cool down with the version numbering. The last version before the current one was labeled 2.2.3-39, but that evolved to 2.2.3-4, which is much more user friendly.

I was really impressed by what I found. With ROSA Software Center, users will be able to perform all package software management tasks from one beautiful and user-friendly graphical application. Here are some screenshots. What these screenshots cannot show is the smooth transition as you navigate between the different aspects of the application. Also, the screenshots cannot show the speed with which the application takes to get stuff done. Installing and removing applications happens so fast it puts similar applications to shame.

Red Hat Family

The tool wraps apps in a portable, lightweight run-time that can execute on laptops, desktops, servers, clusters, hypervisors and even bare metal. Docker can be used to package and automate deployment of applications, databases and back-end systems. Docker is also now part of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service product.

Expected sometime later this year, RHEL 7 will incorporate Fedora 19 and be built around Linux kernel 3.10, the upstream kernel released last June that added support for timerless multitasking, block caching from SSDs and the ARM mixed-CPU architecture. It also changes the default file system to XFS, which supports hard drive volumes as large as 500 TB and integrates with Active Directory. In beta since December, the release candidate was made available on April 15

For now, the Linux kernel available is 3.13.x, which is the same from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The system is basically identical with the previous one, even if there are some changes that have been implemented already.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control experts at the Raytheon Co. Technical Services segment in Dulles, Va., will switch a major unmanned helicopter control system from Solaris to Linux software, and upgrade the system with universal UAV control qualities under terms of a $15.8 million contract.

Phones

Android

Here is some good news for those gamers who have been hanging on to their Ouya consoles. Owners of the Ouya can now stream quite a range of Triple A titles to their little Ouya consoles. This technological feat could be achieved thanks to Play Cast media launching a new cloud gaming beta program.

Open-source software is the philanthropic side of tech. While the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of the world are out making billions, amateurs are still hunched over their desks in bedrooms, classrooms and offices knocking out code for little more than the joy of it, and perhaps some recognition.

Skylable has released LibreS3, an open source implementation of the Amazon S3 service, suitable for installing on private servers in a datacenter. LibreS3 uses Skylable SX, a “reliable, fully distributed cluster solution”, on the back end for deduplication and replication. LibreS3 joins a growing list of alternative, open source storage solutions available to the enterprise today.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

For months now, Google has been pursuing a strategy that allows users of the Chrome browser to easily find and run “packaged apps” just like sophisticated web apps that users of Chrome OS are used to running. Chrome packaged apps are now available in the Chrome Web Store. We’ve covered the fact that this is emerging as a big differentiator for Google’s browser.

SaaS/Big Data

In the annals of enterprise open source adoption, concerns over security have always been present. In fact, there are many enterprises that still don’t allow their users to use open source browsers like Firefox, or use phones based on Android. Ask the IT department personnel at these companies what’s up, and they’ll tell you that they don’t trust these platforms and applications to be secure.

BSD

Looking at the release announcement and other sources such as the release page, it’s easy to see that there are numerous goodies in store for you: A whole new traffic shaping system to replace ALTQ, 64-bit time_t, cryptographically signed base sets and packages, automatic installation features, improved hardware support, and more.

Openness/Sharing

Health/Nutrition

Back in 2008, European Food Safety Authority began pressing the chemical industry to provide safety information on a substance called diphenylamine, or DPA. Widely applied to apples after harvest, DPA prevents “storage scald”—brown spots that “becomes a concern when fruit is stored for several months,” according to Washington State University, reporting from the heartland of industrial-scale apple production.

Human skin is a garden of microbes that is home to about 1,000 bacterial species. Most are benign, but some invade the skin and cause illness—of these, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are particularly dangerous.

Blackwater (or “Academi”) mercenaries have trained Brazil‘s killer cops for the World Cup, as the government plans to deploy 170,000 armed troops to crackdown on protests and social movements against FIFA. That would be one killer cop for almost every person they’ve evicted from their land and homes for the World Cup’s stadiums or parking lots.

No one in Russia can vent his anger over NATO’s eastward expansion quite as vehemently as Viktor Baranez. The popular columnist with the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda (“Komsomol Truth”), which has a readership of millions, is fond of railing against the “insidious and reckless” Western military alliance. Russia, Baranez writes, must finally stop treating NATO as a partner.

Baranez, a retired colonel who was the Defense Ministry’s spokesman under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, asks why Russia should even consider joint maneuvers after being deceived by the West. NATO, he writes, “has pushed its way right up to our national borders with its guns.” He also argues that, in doing so, NATO has broken all the promises it made during the process of German reunification.

The western presstitute media are relentlessly reporting about the kidnapped monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); kidnapped by pro-Russian protesters, allegedly helped by Russian special forces.

Finance

Before his death in February, Jackson Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was helping his constituents chart an economic plan whose main component was worker-owned cooperatives. In her recent article about Lumumba and cooperatives, Laura Flanders cites Collective Courage author Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s point that African-American leaders from Marcus Garvey to W.E.B. DuBois were proponents of cooperatives. DuBois, Garvey and Lumumba understood that worker democracy was necessary for economic sovereignty and community solidarity.

Wolff warns that we cannot band-aid capitalism. However laudable and even attainable may be suggestions from economists like Piketty or Dean Baker, to name just two, piecemeal policies designed to stop the system from funneling wealth upwards will not work for long. The elites are fully focused on preserving and expanding their fortunes, and the structure of the contemporary economy puts in the hands of a very few people in large corporate enterprises “both the incentive and the resources to roll back whatever adjustments a movement from below is able to make.”

The IMF has confirmed a conditional loan of $17bn to Ukraine in what it touts as a rescue package aimed at stabilizing Ukraine as it seeks to maintain independence from a belligerent Russia. Instead, we are witnessing the final stages of the US-EU coup of Ukraine, and by implementing the conditions of the loan, the nation will be left destitute and dependent.

Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, an outspoken socialist, claimed a victory Thursday after Mayor Ed Murray announced a plan to hike the city’s minimum wage to $15, which Sawant was a driving force behind. But she told HuffPost Live’s Alyona Minkovski that she isn’t totally happy with the plan, which gives big corporations years to phase in the new wage.

In an expression of a “new populist” energy, thousands of demonstrators shut down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC on Monday as they demanded a livable wage and an end to the corporate domination of the national economy and politics.

A good many Americans now know the high-finance games that JPMorgan Chase and other big banks like to play — at our expense. And big oil giants like ExxonMobil have been outraging Americans for years.

But plenty of other corporate giants that inflate our inequality have been flying under the radar screen. Who, for instance, has ever heard of Darden? Or Yum! Brands?

These little-known outfits just happen to rate as two of the biggest corporate behemoths in the restaurant industry. They’ve been squeezing workers — and soaking taxpayers — as relentlessly as any enterprises in America. Yet they barely have any national profile at all.

That may be about to change.

Last week, on the eve of the National Restaurant Association annual meeting, two top think tanks — the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and Demos in New York— released new studies that detail how America’s food-service giants are growing the gap between the nation’s rich and everyone else.

This week protesting restaurant workers will be taking that message to the streets. Many of these workers are currently laboring at the $2.13 hourly federal minimum wage for tipped workers, a base that hasn’t budged since 1991.

Down is up. Sick is healthy. The RMS Titanic is seaworthy. Topsy-turvy logic is a speciality of the austerity brigade, and here they come dishing up a third helping. First, in 2010-11, they pledged that making historic cuts amid a global slump would definitely, absolutely secure a strong recovery. Then things went predictably belly-up, forcing Cameron and Osborne to dump their deficit-reduction plans and the eurocrats to make more bailouts. Yet these reversals were, naturally, “sticking to the course”. Now things don’t look quite as awful as they did a couple of years ago – and this somehow gets chalked up as a miraculous rebound.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Since consumer campaigning got GMOs labeled and crop restricting implemented in the United Kingdom, Cameron will likely have a hard time convincing UK consumers that all is well. However, Cameron is getting help in that quest from a little known group called the Science Media Centre (SMC), which helped release the report to great fanfare. The Guardian and The Independent published prominent coverage of the report, and it was featured by the BBC. The Independent and BBC coverage were both entirely uncritical, quoting the scientists handpicked by the SMC for its reporters’ briefing. The Guardian report was less glowing, but still quoted the SMC scientists and buried the reactions of critics below the fold. None of them mentioned that the report briefing was held by the SMC.

Privacy

A year ago there was no way I could have imagined being here, being honored in this room. When I began this, I never expected to receive the level of support that I did from the public. Having seen what happened to the people that came before, specifically Thomas Drake, it was an intimidating thing. I’d realized that the highest likelihood, the most likely outcome of returning this information to public hands would be that I would spend the rest of my life in prison. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.

The actions of the Guardian in complying with the demands of the security services to destroy the computers containing Snowden’s revelations were cowardly in the extreme. There was a principle at stake here. The existence of other copies elsewhere is not the point. That does not make the hard drive destruction better, any more than Nazi book-burning was made OK by the existence of other copies of the books.

Civil Rights

It has been described as the conflict the Arab spring forgot, the last colony in Africa and a human rights scandal. Now British holidaymakers are being urged to respond to the situation in Western Sahara by boycotting its occupier, Morocco, as a destination.

A leading human rights activist from Western Sahara, Brahmin Dahane, 46, made the appeal after meeting members of the UK parliament to drum up support ahead of a UN security council debate on Tuesday.

A005A 12 year old boy attempting to save a local youth club due to be closed by government cuts has been dragged from his classroom after his Facebook protest was spotted by anti-terror police. What’s even more shocking is this story is from December 2010…and things have only gotten worse.

The lawyer for Barrett Brown, the activist-journalist in jail in Texas on charges related to his involvement with computer hackers, has called for an overhaul in the way technology cases are handled by the criminal justice system to counteract potential abuses and excessive prosecutorial aggression on the part of the US government.

Buying a cell phone plan could make you powerless to sue your phone company if it defrauds you. Using a coupon to buy a box of cereal may mean you give up your right to sue if the food is tainted. Checking your grandmother into a nursing home could prevent you from holding the facility accountable for negligence. “Liking” something on Facebook could sign you on to a legally binding contract that you’ve never read.

EFF is launching a new extension for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them. You can try it out today:

Internet/Net Neutrality

Following his weak attempt to diffuse concerns about his bogus “open internet” rules, FCC boss Tom Wheeler has decided to try again, by basically repeating what he said last week with slightly stronger language about how he won’t let broadband providers violate net neutrality. Of course, as many people have explained, the problem is that the new rules clearly aren’t strong enough, and leave open all sorts of ways to kill off basic neutrality online. Of course, the real problem is that the original 2010 “open internet” rules (which were really crafted by the telcos in the first place) didn’t really protect net neutrality in the first place, and the new rules are basically an even weaker version of those rules. But, have no fear, claims Wheeler, if these rules don’t work, he promises he’ll actually pull out the big gun, Title II, and reclassify broadband players as telco services rather than information services, allowing the FCC to put them under common carrier rules.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

Mega.co.nz, the cloud storage company founded by Kim Dotcom, has seen the number of uploads triple in the past six months. Mega users now upload a total of half a billion files per month. According to Kim Dotcom, the MPAA and RIAA deserve some credit for the unprecedented growth.

A few years ago, we wrote about how a guy named Dimitry Shirokov, with help from the law firm of Booth Sweet had taken on the “fathers” of copyright trolling in the US, Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, who had formed an organization called US Copyright Group, which initiated the first round of mass copyright trolling in the US (before the likes of Prenda and others entered the space). Shirokov had tried to make his lawsuit a class action against the lawyers, claiming fraud and extortion. And while the class action part was unfortunately rejected, the case has ended with a victory for Shirokov, with the judge ordering DGW to pay $39,909.95 ($3,179.52 to Shirokov and the rest in attorneys’ fees to Booth Sweet).

I began working with the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2012 for program and community support in India. With the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program, we focus on open access for scholarly publications to help communities enrich Wikipedia entries for Indic languages.

While I was negotiating with a few authors to relicense their copyrighted books to a Creative Commons license (a license that allows anyone to reuse, modify and use content), I began identifying certain areas of motivation for an author to donate their work as free content.

We worked closely with Goa University, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa Trust, and the Institute of Odia Studies and Research.

It may seem like a wishy-washy answer, but there’s an alarming point nested within it: the Solicitor General’s office’s position that the interpretation of the law—which the executive branch has worked into our international trade obligations—is the only way for the law to be “properly construed.”

That in turn suggests that the executive branch believes it is responsible for properly constructing the law. Of course, that position stands in conflict with Marbury v. Madison, the case that established judicial review in 1803: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”

That has serious implications for the democratic process. Here’s how it seems to work: the executive branch comes up with an interpretation of U.S. copyright law and then negotiates it into international agreements. It conducts these negotiations in secret, insisting that it needs no meaningful oversight because it doesn’t require a change in U.S. law.

More or less overnight, betting companies slashed their odds of the Swedish Pirate Party’s re-election to the European Parliament. Where a re-election scenario used to give you 8x your money back in a bet with them, it now gives a mere 1.25x. It appears the betting companies know something that Swedish oldmedia haven’t picked up on yet.

Kim Dotcom, the multi-millionaire hacker-turned-entrepreneur, was on the roof of his New Zealand mansion, handcuffed and surrounded.

One by one, his luxury cars were rolled out of garages and taken away. Dotcom’s accounts, in various different countries, were frozen.

His website, file storage service Megaupload, was shut down.

Filings made in a court in Virginia outlined the accusation. Dotcom, US authorities said, was the man behind a “criminal enterprise” which used Megaupload to profit from piracy on a “massive scale”. He faces more than 20 years in prison.

After landing an early victory last week against Quentin Tarantino in their leaked screenplay row, Gawker is facing a new attack. In an amended complaint, Tarantino accuses Gawker of committing not only contributory infringement, but also direct infringement, after it illegally downloaded his script from a file-hosting site.

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Microsoft's charm offensives against Free/libre software are proving to be rather effective, despite them involving a gross distortion of facts and exploitation of corruptible elements in the corporate media

A British MEP criticises Battistelli and the management of the European Patent Office (EPO) while Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, UK Minister for Intellectual Property, gets closer to Battistelli in a tactless effort to improve relations